Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

shagunjhaver.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 154 posts

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#21

Post by tashoecraft »

saagarjha wrote: post #10
Ididntdothis wrote: post #7

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

I think the liability is so remote as to be a fake reason. It's a cop out to get out of doing it or even to look into doing it.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#22

Post by otterley »

stronglikedan wrote: post #19
otterley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds reasonable to me. Reddit is not and never was a democracy; at best it’s a benevolent dictatorship - just like every other social media platform. It costs nothing to start a new subreddit if you want different rules. And if lots of Redditors agree with you, they’ll happily follow you.

> benevolent dictatorship Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one…

In my experience, what often happens is that telling them the reason often results in a repeat of the same behavior, but modified only minimally in an attempt to avoid violating the letter of the rules, but not necessarily the spirit of them. This leads to a constant back and forth and is exhausting to the community and moderators.

Sometimes you just have to show boorish guests the door.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#23

Post by kd5bjo »

saagarjha wrote: post #10
Ididntdothis wrote: post #7

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

I suspect that often the reason for not getting a job is simply that there were more qualified candidates than positions. In that case, there may be no reasons to give; someone else was selected but your application wasn’t deficient in any way.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#24

Post by betenoire »

jeltz wrote: post #13
saagarjha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

I am skeptical. Because I see this issue in my country too where opening yourself to liability is not an issue. Maybe one could argue that it is due to cultural influences from the US which are copied without the original context, but ... eh, I feel it is pretty weak.

Liability and "speaking for the employer" aside...

When I was first starting out, I found a job posting that I really wanted, so I applied and interviewed. I felt the interview went pretty well, but I got a call back that I wasn't what they were looking for. It was a small company, and the head of IT called me back to give me the bad news.

I really wanted the job, so I asked why. He told me I was too junior of a developer, and didn't understand OOP well enough. Being young and cocky as I was, I straight up told him I disagreed (looking back nearly 15 years, he was totally right). I didn't recall talking about OOP, per se, in the interview, and I had nothing to lose at this point, so I pressed the matter. I doubt it was OOP specifically that concerned him, and that it was more of a proxy for my inexperience. Either way, somehow I managed to get him to ask me about OOP over the phone. We talked a little about the vague concepts, and I have no fucking idea what happened, but he changed his mind and offered me the job. It was a great job, and I quickly learned how inexperienced I really was, but I grew a lot.

What am I getting at... in forums, you still _want_ them to participate, and come back. It is the opposite in an interview, you have essentially ended the relationship. Offering feedback starts the conversation again, and gives punks like me a chance to drag it out, disagree, and waste your time. We are just as likely to disagree with your assessment, if not more so, than to take it to heart.

Thank god he gave me another chance, I loved that job

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#25

Post by shakna »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #20
saagarjha wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. It’s probably a similar thing to why you’re not told the reasons for not getting a job, even though it’s somewhat unfortunate that it means useful context is lost…

> I think the reasons nobody tells you anything anymore is because doing so would open you up to liability. Google has no legal obligation to provide you with Drive services, though. I believe they specifically disclaim any obligation in the EULA you agree to. Google in particular seems to have a broad and well-established policy of refusing to talk to individual users, whether for bans or simple support, outside of…

> Google has no legal obligation to provide you with Drive services, though. I believe they specifically disclaim any obligation in the EULA you agree to.

That doesn't mean that the EULA is actually legally binding.

Nations with tougher consumer protections may actually allow recourse when Google decides to break a contract without what would be considered "good reason" under those same protections.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#26

Post by defertoreptar »

otterley wrote: post #16
haunter wrote: post #6

Otoh reddit mods has 0 accountability, "if you don't like them make your own sub" basically that's the official stance

Sounds reasonable to me. Reddit is not and never was a democracy; at best it’s a benevolent dictatorship - just like every other social media platform. It costs nothing to start a new subreddit if you want different rules. And if lots of Redditors agree with you, they’ll happily follow you.

It's not about democracy or ideology at all. If we have the ability to design a better place for people to share ideas and discuss what's on their mind, we ought to make it as good as we can. One of the strengths of Reddit's "subreddit stewardship design" is how it allows the site to scale while still having people take ownership of each subreddit, allowing them to give it a more personal touch and better able to respond to specific community needs.

One of the weaknesses of this is how, at least on some subs, mods are able to censor discussion largely unnoticed, without being held accountable to the community. See r/declineintocensorship, r/watchredditdie, and r/yallcantbehave for several examples of egotistical mods overextending their role with no real benefit to the community.

I can't help but think that there's a way to hold mods more accountable to their communities. For example, if the modded comment wasn't spam, it could say "this post was removed for breaking rule x which states y. Click here to see the comment," with the mod's username attached.

I would also like to see statistics on removed posts, where a subreddit gets some sort of penalty for censoring too much, such as not appearing on /r/all, or becoming downweighted in some way.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#27

Post by stronglikedan »

otterley wrote: post #22
stronglikedan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> benevolent dictatorship Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one…

In my experience, what often happens is that telling them the reason often results in a repeat of the same behavior, but modified only minimally in an attempt to avoid violating the letter of the rules, but not necessarily the spirit of them. This leads to a constant back and forth and is exhausting to the community and moderators. Sometimes you just have to show boorish guests the door.

Then you've encountered much nicer mods than I have. My initial questions into my banning were more often than not met by a boorish mod hurling insults, even though I always kept it civil. There's plenty of subreddits putting this type of bad mod behavior on display, so I know I wasn't the only one. In fact, bad mods were so prevalent when I left, it was a daily running joke in a lot of communities.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#28

Post by shakna »

Arnt wrote: post #14
woliveirajr wrote: post #2

It seems so obvious that it's a pitty it wasn't studied before. It doesn't work just online: ask a children to solve some problem in a blackboard and then erase it without telling a thing, while leaving answers from other kids on it. You'll see that nobody likes to be "corrected" without an explanation.

Noone likes to be corrected without an explanation. That part is fine. But explaining takes time for the moderators as well as providing value to the user, and some users try to get past moderation by overwhelming the moderators. Spamming.

The automated removal can also come with broad reasoning in response, and that doesn't overwhelm the system.

"Violating Policy X" (where X can be something like Twitter's Rules, not necessarily something specific) is still a terrible explanation, but isn't nothing either. Vague enough spammers can't use it to game the system, specific enough that user's can guess they did something wrong.

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#29

Post by mavhc »

stronglikedan wrote: post #19
otterley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds reasonable to me. Reddit is not and never was a democracy; at best it’s a benevolent dictatorship - just like every other social media platform. It costs nothing to start a new subreddit if you want different rules. And if lots of Redditors agree with you, they’ll happily follow you.

> benevolent dictatorship Regardless, it's still frustrating. Especially when they cannot tell you which "rule" you broke, so they resort to telling you they can use their discretion to ban you for any reason (which is usually some sort of agenda that becomes apparent after you've tried to have a civil discussion about why you were banned). It's what drove me away from that platform, and I'm sure I'm not the only one…

Write a bot that has the max power, run it on a cloud server, let it change its own password and have its own paypal account so no one can turn it off, just requires donations to keep running.

Let it run on a set of rules, and count votes to change rules. Now you have DemocracyBot

Re: Telling users why their content was removed reduces future issues [pdf]

#30

Post by sct202 »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #7

There seems to be a general trend to avoid explanations in a lot of areas. For example, you often get no feedback after job interviews. Google just canceled my Drive subscription after 10 years without telling why but they offered me to sign up again. No idea why and support wouldn’t tell. How are people supposed to learn and improve without knowing told what they did wrong?

I think people just don't want to have other people argue or get offended with them over the reasons, like on dating apps people just straight up ghost instead of having a potential confrontation.
Post reply on HN